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Comment by teo_zero | Hacker News Reader

In fact zero-based has shown some undeniable advantages over one-based. I couldn't explain it better than Dijkstra's famous essay: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

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It's fine, I can see the advantages. I just think it's a weird level of blindness to act like 1 indexing is some sort of aberration. It's really not. It's actually quite friendly for new or casual programmers, for one.

I think the objection is not so much blindness as the idea that professional tools should not generally be tailored to the needs of new or casual users at the expense of experienced users.

Is there any actual evidence that new programmers really find this hard? Python is renowned for being beginner friendly and I've never heard of anyone suggesting it was remotely a problem.

There are only a few languages that are purely for beginners (LOGO and BASIC?) so it's a high cost to annoy experienced programmers for something that probably isn't a big deal anyway.

I think the claim might harken back to the days when programming was a new thing and mathematicians,physicists,etc were the ones most often getting started at it, if they had by training gotten used to 1 based indexing in mathematics it was probably a bit of a pain to adapt (and why R and Matlab,etc use 1-based indexing).

Thus, 1 probably wasn't "easier", it just adhered to an existing orthodoxy that "beginners" came from at the time.

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